Satirical Novels

Gore Vidal's The Golden Age

From The Golden Age, by Gore Vidal, 2000. (Novel 7 of the 7-novel "Narratives of Empire" series.)

The Golden Age is set in the years 1939-1954, and in 2000. Caroline, Blaise, and Peter Sanford, James Burden Day, and Clay Overbury all return as characters from Washington D.C. (Caroline, Blaise, and James Burden Day are introduced to the reader in Empire.) Historical personae include Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Herbert Hoover, WindellWillkie, Harry Truman, John Latouche, and John Foster Dulles.

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Eleanor [Roosevelt] had been late in joining them. "There has always been something odd about my blood. But the doctor says there's nothing really wrong."

As the President wheeled himself past her, he gave her a friendly slap on the bottom. "But what did he have to say about that big fat ass of yours?"

Without a pause, Eleanor had said, "I'm afraid, dear, you were never mentioned."

Even the President had laughed, 69with every appearance of heartiness; and Caroline had glimpsed another aspect of the Roosevelt relationship. It was the shy Eleanor who held the knife and so was the one to be feared.

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Tim wondered how anyone could have thought that this blunderer might begin to compete with the master in the White House whose vast depths of benign insincerity could never be entirely plumbed.

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"Grand Rapids is very like Paris in these matters."

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Caroline had always liked [William Randolph] Hearst's longtime mistress, Marion Davies, a blond actress with a stammer and a serious drinking problem, of which the most serious aspect was how to hide her bottles from the alert eye of the Chief, whose uncanny gift of discernment was so highly developed that no suit of Elizabethan armor on th most sweeping staircase could hide, for long, her gin in its bot. Bus she always managed to hide enough to keep dull sobriety at bay and so increase the pleasure of her court, as fun- and gin-loving as she. A star of silent pictures, she was feared to be ruled out of talking pictures by her stammer. Specialists had been called in. For a time, she had acted with a pebble in her mouth; then during a passionate love scene she swallowed it. Later she developed a curiously effective style of speaking that required deep breathing in the middle of words. Overnight she was acclaimed as a distinguished actress with an inimitable style.

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[E]verything in Eleanor Roosevelt's White House was dusty, including the Queen's room [which] occupied the northeast corner of the second floor. In honor of its recent royal occupant, some prints of Queen Victoria were haphazardly hung on the walls. Caroline recognized Eleanor's absentminded touch. The clock on the mantel was ten minutes slow. Caroline wondered if this was deliberate. The British royal family kept their clocks ahead of tie, ten minutes fast, to create anxiety about punctuality. Fortunately, to counteract the misleading White House clocks, a bell always rant to announce the President's arrival in a particular room. He had been, for some minutes now, in the oval study down the hall from the Queen's room. This meant that it was seven-fifteen p.m. The sacred cocktail hour when the President would putter about with bottles and shakers and greet whoever happened to be staying in the house as well as the odd guest guest who might be joining the family for dinner......"We have only th cocktail hour," said Franklin, "before Eleanor's young communists join us for dinner."....."Are they communists?" [Caroline asked.]

"Some, I suppose Or they think they are this week. I shall be benignly noncommittal."

"Your greatest role."

"Do you think so?" Franklin placed a cigarette in a holder. Caroline lit it for him......During this, a black steward had placed a tray full of bottles and glasses on the President's desk, to which he now returned. "I think a martini will hit the spot." The Roosevelt special. Caroline loathed gin but gamely drank the President's astonishing concoction, whose secret ingredients were two brands of vermouth, each sweeter that the other, and a dash of absinthe to destroy the palate.

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...that brave pompous invention of the Enlightenment, the United States set in a wilderness, forever dreaming itself Athens reborn even as it crudely, doggedly, recreated Rome.

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Caroline had never cared for [Winston Churchill] the half-American British politician who, when it seemed opportune, had no conscience about changing parties. [He] had only recently been recalled from political limbo by Chamberlain to be First Lord of the Admiralty, a post that when he had held it in the World War had provided him with a wide margin--if not indeed a whole page--on which to commit all sorts of gaudy military errors.

"Two journalists," she announced, grimly. "Churchill and Mussolini are both professional journalists. They think in headlines. Startling phases. Exaggerations."

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"Pay no attention to Harry. He's an optimist. That's because he's a social worker." Laura's non sequiturs had a kind of majesty.

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The Grand Old Party was uncommonly rich in boys this season while all the Democratic leaders were visibly aging, their famous faces etiolated from too much exposure to too many flashbulbs.

"I hate this shit." [Wendell] Willkie's Indiana accent was as countrified as his haircut.

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"You would look marvelous with blue hair." Laura Delano, the President's middle-aged cousin, turned her elegant fave full upon Caroline, who took an inadvertent step backward as if to better observe the sculpted blue hair of her hostess for the night.

"I don't have the coloring to carry it off," Caroline responded smoothly, as if every day of her life she had considered whether or not to dye her hair blue.

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[Former President Herbert] Hoover took a handkerchief; mopped his forehead; and continued.... "People forget that when I was elected president, we were occupying most of Central America and the Caribbean. I pulled the Marines out of Haiti, out of Nicaragua, and then when our war-lovers insisted that we invade Cuba and Panama and Honduras, I said no. They invoked the Monroe Doctrine. I invited them to read it. We should never possess more military strength than is needed to make sure that no one will ever dare invade us."

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Peter liked nothing better than to explore the miles of antiseptic Pentagon corridors where, it was said, if you walked far enough and long enough you were bound to meet yourself coming from the opposite direction, a nice metaphysical exercise in quantum physics, a subject that they had recently, mysteriously, been ordered to read up on.

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"I was always drawn to the larger-than-life losers."

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On March 21, nine days after Truman declared his "doctrine" to Congress, he created a Loyalty Review Board before which several million government workers would each be forced to swear that never, ever, deep in his heart of hearts, had he for an instant lusted after the evil, the godless, the monolithic, the wold-conquering doctrine of communism, whose Vatican was the Kremlin and whose dues were everywhere in the government, in the classrooms, and even, it was whispered, in the churches of God's last best hope of earth.

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A bright blue light from the doorway illuminated the dining room. Television light. Reflexively, senators checked their wigs; pushed at their hair; adjusted smiles. In his shadowy corner, Joe McCarthy seemed to expand like some huge bullfrog in the glow of the source of his power, television. Peter also noticed that his head was trembling.